Justice as Healing and Transformation
for SUNY-Cortland’s Center for Ethics, Peace and Social Justice (CEPS)
by S.M. Rodriguez, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology
Director of LGBTQ+ Studies
Hofstra University
Our society relies on a corrective logic, in which we believe in enforcing assimilatory behaviors, identities and mental states. This reliance remains for most, even when simultaneously acknowledging a social structure that neither supports nor desires equity in access to the resources required to be, contribute and live well. That is to say, our society emphasizes the efforts to punish and correct individuals, rather than efforts to provide, inspire or heal as communities. This corrective violence mostly applies to people whose bodyminds signal deviance; Black, indigenous, mad, disabled and queer markers render people perpetually vulnerable (Rodriguez, Ben-Moshe and Rakes, 2020).
This talk will center the race-ability nexus (Ben-Moshe, 2020) and the transformative practices that have emerged from Black and queer feminist organizations that uplift healing and wellness access as a racial justice praxis existing purposefully outside of the “medical industrial complex” (Audre Lorde Project, Harriet’s Apothecary, and Kindred Healing Justice Collective). I recall racialization as a process of codifying people based on imagined ability and appropriating and circulating resources (including human labor or healthcare) accordingly (Raffo, Taneja and Page, 2020). Simultaneously, I present policing as a project that falls along these racialized lines (Nelson, 2016).
I will then offer how the movement for transformative justice centers the practices, philosophies and possibilities of an anticarceral future. This justice system realizes the redistribution of resources outside of the state (i.e. mutual aid and care collectivities) and builds our collective capacity for accountability outside of punishment and labeling. I will conclude by highlighting that transformation and healing rely on sustainably offering and receiving protection, dignity and support.
Works Referenced:
Ben-Moshe, L. (2020). Decarcerating disability: Deinstitutionalization and prison abolition. U of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir. (Discipline and Punish). Paris, 1, 192-211.
Nelson, C. Racializing Disability, Disabling Race: Policing Race and Mental Status, 15 BERKELEY J. CRIM. L. 1 (2010)
Raffo, S., Taneja, A. & C. Page (2020) Healing Histories: Disrupting the Medical Industrial Complex. Accessed on https://carapage.co/the-medical-industrial-complex-mic/
Rodriguez, S. M., Ben-Moshe, L., & Rakes, H. (2020). Carceral protectionism and the perpetually (in) vulnerable. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 20(5), 537-550.
Sponsored by the Philosophy Department, Center for Ethics, Peace and Social Justice, Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies, Africana Studies Department, Wagadu Journal, Black Student Union, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression (SOGIE), PRIDE Club, Health Department and the Institutional Equity and Inclusion Office, Campus Artist and Lecture Series (CALS)
- Time: 2:50 PM - 4:00 PM
- Location: Online / WebEx